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Caldera's Almost-Linux Skips The Linux Kernel
Cassivs points to this UnixReview article, which says "Caldera has released Open UNIX 8, which includes a complete GNU/Linux distribution, except that it runs on the SVR5 kernel, acquired from SCO. It uses the same packages as Caldera's OpenLinux 3.1. It should scale much better, and provides a commercial UNIX kernel with the ability to natively develop GNU/Linux applications." It sounds like a non-Linux kernel has advantages on certain hardware, even running exactly the same software otherwise -- I wonder how long that will be true. Caldera has talked about this product, with it's Linux Kernel Personality, for a long time, and this is an informative review for anyone following it.
GNU/UNIX?
I guess GNU really IS UNIX after all!
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
so its much like AIX5L wich caldera(SCO) helped them create as far as I can work out
(any info ?)
this might be a nice product but it runs on x86 hardware and the clustering is not something that is revelutionary you can get heartbeat for linux and D.Becker seems to have MPI + rest going nicely
But its a nice way of going about things as proved by the AIX impl
But IBM sells the hardware thats where they get the suppport contracts from where is Caldera going to get them from ?
How about geting the UDI project running nicely and chargeing vendors for drivers on unix or about the nice update stuff the caldera has?
this as far as I'm concerned is the SCO staff trying to accert their will over the company
regards
john jones
Hey, why does everyone bash Caldera? Because they are not 100% free like Debian? Because they try to make money off a per-plate license?
Hey, if companies want to pay the per-plate thing, let them. It will be good for Caldera, as they are just trying to survive like the other Linux companies. If Caldera dies, so does some open-source sponsorships and development (like Webmin).
I personally like the OpenLinux distro. It is very business-like (or maybe MS-like), but that is appealing to me. I don't like looking at retarded penguin animations while I login. It also has some very cool admin tools, especially for servers.
I am glad to see this Caldera UNIX distro. They are just trying something new, trying to stay in business. That is most important. Stop picking on them.
ntfs is "experimental"
once you realize you are not the only one having problems with some code, you can turn to your peers to help you out. in this case, you should go look at a linux kernel mailing list archive. there are fixes for all sorts of code goofies.
hope this helps.
http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/
GNU's Now Unix?
-- Steve
A latent existence
Isnt this just SCO with GNU packages installed?
The only thing I liked about SCO unix was Merge which became lin4win for linux.
SVR5 was a little different compared to the BSD and Linux boxes I was used too. Of course I was dealing with some mixed versions of SCO, some in Italian (for Olivetti)...
But now that im only using Solaris, I dont remember what those differences are! lol
As clearly stated in the article, there is a linux mode. After you type in "linux" is does things from the /linux partition and runs in Linux mode, including binary emulation. It can run and develop full Linux applications within the session.
It sounds quite impressive.
C'mon don't be lame, I have been using every single 2.4 update with ntfs support and MANY experimental features...never had a single problem. I am not saying you are incompetent, but an informed comment would be far more helpful than that kind of ridiculous statement.
This is the problem running alternative os's on x86 platforms.
Caldera needs to hook up with particular OEM's who want to create mission critical using openunix. If caldrea can't convince OEM's that openunix will sell, then the OS is doomed. No sane IT manager would buy an OS without approved hardware. Most Linux servers for example run on Dell or Compaq systems that are linux approved. This issue will not go away unless the kernel is opensourced and the gnu community can write drivers for it. I also hope it doesn't use the openserver libraries. Microsoft made Xenix as proprietary as possible and openserver was based on Xenix. Compiling gnu apps might be difficult. Hopefully OpenUnix's libc libraries are those from AT&T.
Anyway Caldera is dying. Its a shame because it was my first linux distro. Caldera was ahead in the linux and dos game but they did not have good marketing. Redhat totally took over. Also Ransome love's comments on the evils of gnu and opensource did not help. Client access licenses also hurt it severly. Caldera just got rid of one of the main arguements of using linux instead NT or Unix. The cost and licensing issues for small projects on limited budgets is what linux's key market is. Also linux runs on cheaper hardware. If Caldera keeps this up, then the arguement to use OpenLinux or even OpenUnix is moot. I chose Redhat for my servers thank you.
http://saveie6.com/
I nearly got fired last week when NFS running on redhat 7.1 nearly gobbled up all the ram in the system and needed to be stoped and restarted again. This bug is real. However NTFS is "experimental" and should not be used. But their is no reason why NFS should fail!
Linux otherwise has been pretty stable for me but if problems like this arise again due to buggy daemons, then I will happilly switch back to solaris. I believe thier is also a rumoured bug with servers with more then 2 gigs of ram that causes the kernel to panic. The trend is bothering me. Yes, linux has bugs in it just like any OS out their and this guys comments on NFS are true. Don't mod him down.
http://saveie6.com/
With regard to the kernel itself, what are the ramifications of this structure security-wise? While I know this particular kernel has been around awhile (hell, SCO is ancient), it makes me curious.
To me, one of the primary advantages of using a Linux kernel is the "many eyes" approach to security. While I appreciate the fact that the distribution using a full suite of GNU/Linux utilities and such, I'd be somewhat apprehensive about the kernel itself (stability through age aside).
Anyone who has any insight into this, please reply!
I wish caldera would get thier naming right, how am I supposed to know which one is Linux XP and which one is Linux ME? :)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
With debian we have debian on Linux and debian on Hurd.
:( Duty calls.
So in a way Caldera is a little bit like debian.
There are other ways Caldera is like debian which I would list if I had time... But I must be off.
So can I go download a Caldera Unix 8 iso image? I couldn't find one on their site. If I'm not mistaken, they still have to make the GNU tools they use available in source form, right?
Has anyone found a place where you can d/l this release, or is it only available for purchase?
Ok it runs on the X86 platform... why?
I used to run SCO, I was a SCO fanatic back in the 286/386 days I have cince replaced SCO with linux and BSD because I dont have to fork over tons of money to support new hardware, I can modify the kernel, and I got the DEV kit for free instead of $950.00!! Except for having someone to sue in case it crashes what is the use? it offeres no advantages whatsoever.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Somebody has definately written patches to support CPU hot-swapping in Linux. i believe it's a matter of "cat 0 > /proc/sys/cpu/1/active" (Or something similar) to take a CPU down. You can then safely remove it, hardware support notwithstanding.
As for Solaris, its record is hardly stellar. For example, Solaris NFS for many years had a bug that would randomly replace blocks of data with blocks of nulls in big files (people often spent weeks trying to figure out what was wrong with their software until they finally traced it to Solaris). There have been memory leaks driver problems, and backwards incompatibilities with Solaris. Most production users of Solaris are a couple of years behind the releases in order to avoid the bugs in the new releases. And many people never wanted to switch from SunOS to Solaris at all (I think we are still running some SunOS machines).
As they say, "the grass is always greener". I can tell you from many years living with SunOS/Solaris that Linux isn't bad in comparison.
IBM did this last year with AIX 5L. AND, it'll run on PPC, x86, and IA64. This was IBM's fork of the fabled Monterrey project (Unix' most promising vaporware) which died as soon as SCO got bought. I guess SCO's fork is just now coming out.
Of course, when I submitted the story, it got rejected.
+++
NO CARRIER
You don't need a GUI to admin the machine, but it is rather convenient on occasion, especially when doing the initial setup/configuration.
Many 3rd party softare packages (think, Oracle) don't have a console based installation. Sure, you can run X remotely, and I have done that plenty often, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to have Gnome there as a convenience. Presumably once the system is running "for real", you would turn off the X server to conserve resources.
Caldera, from the beginning, has tried to be the Microsoft of Linux. Most recently, Ransom Love has taken to publicly slagging the GPL, and has said they were looking for ways to proprietize their stuff so they can rape the users more fully. This looks like the beginning of it.
I haven't liked, or trusted, these guys for at least 5 years. I used to use Caldera, but now, I've sworn off them more than I've sworn off Windows.
Slack, Debian, Redhat, BSD, whatever. They're all better than Caldera, just because of the "Caldera Attitude". Ransom Love thinks he deserves a stable of Ferraris for packaging someone else's code and selling it.
Bah. I'd use Windows before I use Caldera.
I maintain two SCO UnixWare 7.1.1 servers and they do run like dogs. Linux is much faster and arguably better. Granted, UnixWare has VxFS included, but these days when we have JFS and XFS ported to Linux, that's really a non-issue too.
The SVR5 implementation of UnixWare had to be rehashed in order to increment version numbers and issue a new product. So Caldera slaps in a few things:
1) Fix apparent bugs
2) Attach more integrated GNU packages to the main distro
3) Update the Linux emulator to support more system calls
But this does not in my opinion warrant a whole new major version number. They have done pretty much nothing else with the distro. I will not be upgrading the 7.1.1 servers here as they will be phased out, but also because there is really no reason to.
Caldera is doing nothing but reselling the SCO product line. Of course they are, since there is an installed base and they can charge the same as SCO charged for it. The Linux business is, just as somebody very insightfully said, hurting them. They can't demand license fees, because all one has to do is to go to RedHat. They can't fix their distribution too much, because they become incompatible with RedHat that way. They can't charge much more than RedHat for their distro either, because not that many people would buy it. Perhaps OpenLinux is a bit ahead of its time? Probably so, but that doesn't solve their problems.
I think Caldera is realising that it has at least a temporary cash cow with SCO and thus tries to get its moneys worth. It seems to be forgetting that the business practices of SCO practically brought them to their knees and Caldera is just walking in their foot steps. The only difference is the name. Which I by the way find is pretty lame. There is nothing Open about SCO UNIX and there never was. The development kit is aged and not very good at all. SCO managed to sign some contracts with third party vendors to include some apps with their distro. These are still coming for Open UNIX. Compaq has an agreement with SCO (Caldera too?) as an OEM. This means that a customer can buy a Compaq server with Open UNIX rather than Windows NT/2000. But the sales of these are very slim.
If I was on the board of Caldera, I would swiftly make some changes in the licensing schema of Open UNIX. Granted, it can't be GPLed because of thirdparty proprietary code. But I would definately make it more available. They charge for a media kit ($65) and only give a single user license to non-commercial use. That is an enforced license which means that the system only accepts one concurrent login. This is useless for the hobbyist, so they aren't spreading the word. They have to make UNIX as exciting as Linux in order to prevail. Sure, charge the big corporations license fees. But the small businesses and home users who want a UNIX server should have to pay nothing for it.
Caldera can't do this because they would lose money that way. Some old SCO shops aren't that big and would then fall under the clause of a free OS. That means that the distribution may go up but it doesn't give them a larger revenue stream right away. Look at Sun and the free Solaris offer. Lots more people use it now, but Sun can't start charging for it unless it's for a huge server (8+ CPUs). Sun has revenue from other things, mainly their hardware. Caldera only sells software. A big catch 22.
If Caldera continues like this, they will either have to sell of the SCO division or perish. What if they can't sell it off? Will SCO UNIX become abandonware or can it be opened before they close the doors? Will SCO UNIX (read SVR5) die and be buried because it can't be opened? Would be a terrible loss.
Then there is the conspiracy deal. What if Microsoft would buy the UNIX copyright and codebase? They could stash the code in the trash can and be done with that threat. Sun could have its license revoked or perhaps be charged so much for license fees that they couldn't maintain SVR4 Solaris anymore. I know they aren't paying any royalties now, but surely that could be circumvented... That would be the true extinction of UNIX as we know it. Good in one way, but bad in others.
What if Sun bought the copyright? Or IBM? Whoever will own it in 10 years, will the codebase be opened? Who knows, but I will be following this subject over the next few years.
Alex
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
I have to second your opinion. I bought a new computer a mere three weeks ago. Since that time there have been TWO new releases of the kernel! This is ridiculous. You know for damn sure that two kernels did not get proper testing in a three week time span.
Release early and often is good. Release early and often and call it stable is bad.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
i believe it's a matter of "cat 0 > /proc/sys/cpu/1/active" (Or something similar)
:)
You would probably want to use echo, not cat.
More info about it can be found here:
link to mail archive.
They're not trying to fracture anything. They're trying to be compatible with Linux. Big difference.
The old Unix fracturing came about because all the companies deliberately made things non-compatible in a failed attempt to lock in their customer base. In this situation Caldera is bending over backwards for interoperability.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Caldera is not trying to take over anything. SCO is a company that has been dying for many, many years.
They are simply trying to stave off the ultimate fall, much like Silicon Graphics.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Clearly thou miss understandeth my post!
Forsooth, I simply stateth that Debian is not unlike Caldera in that they have interchangeth the kernels there unto. Ye Caldera has chosen Open Unix while ye old Debian can found to use HURD or on occasion FreeBSD.
The similarities there in are obvious to all! Therefore, I must prostest vociferously the my post was most unquestionably On Topic!
Certainly, thou seemest to be on crack!
Hey kewl, i can take my CPU d...
This sig is intentionally left blank
As many have stated, GNU utilities are nothing new to SCO (cf. Skunkware). For those who aren't quite knowledgeable of SVR5, there *are* serious advantages to running a UNIX(tm) kernel as opposed to Linux. Not all of these are hardware related.
UNIX(tm) has TLI and STREAMS support. Linus has explicitly decided that TLI is to be passed over in favor of sockets, and STREAMS isn't to be supported at all (leading to some hackneyed workarounds regarding ptys). So for those of you who will say "big deal, SCO kernel has some better hardware/threading/${FOO}, we'll develop the drivers/mutexes/${BAR} for it," there are some things that will never, ever be put into the main source tree due to administrative decision.
Yes, TLI and STREAMS have inherent performance penalties, but they provide a much more sane API for driver development. Hardware today is fast enough to handle a small performance penalty that Linus' 386 could not.
In short: This is a good thing, because it presents a system which runs on x86 which has significant DESIGN differences. Someone has opted for the other fork of the tradeoff branch; assuming the standard utilies and libc are in sync with Linux's GNU toolkit, this means that the same application can take advantage of two different paradigms for two different situations (BSD/sockets vs TLI+STREAMS). I guess this is like the BSD/a.out vs. Linux/ELF scenario of a couple years back. Each system has its pros and cons, programs are source compatible to work with either.
Now that *that* little ruckus has been resolved...
So this really is nothing new. UNIX kernel, (optional) GNU utilities (e.g, Skunkware). Most big UNIX vendors distributed UNIX utilities (Sun, SCO/Caldera,etc) with GNU utils. Hell, NeXT made gcc their default compiler (and charged thousands of dollars for it. Ha!). And it's a good thing. I'm glad.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
In my job as a QA tester, we run many different NOS's for compatibility. OpenUnix 8.0 is virtually no different from Unixware 7.1.1, other than the fact that Caldera logos have replaced SCO ones. Big freaking deal.
The OS is still cumbersome to install, and far less user friendly than any Linux distro. Of course, SCO is a true enterprise server Unix, which is it's sole (vanishing) advantage over Linux.
I was extremely disappointed that 8.0 lacked ANY improvement in user friendliness, which is the major thing I expected Caldera to bring to SCO. Caldera's Linux distros (which I also test) probably have the best installer of any Linux (though I really like TurboLinux's text mode installer). Also, the SCO shell lacks all of the user-friendliness the GNU BASH shell has, which makes it one of the hardest command lines to master (particularly when you first Unix exposure was the friendly BASH command line).
OpenUnix 8.0 is nothing more than a "slap our new name on it and get it out" to generate new revenue release. I'd advise anyone running 7.1.1 to wait until 8.1. Unfortunately, licensing isn't the ONLY one of MS's business practices that Caldera is imitating.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
really? umm...
According to the latest IDC pre-released report - Worldwide IT spending on Linux is increasing from 3% to 9% by 2002..
So? Is Linux loosing ground? I hardly think so...
Do your homework before you past such a crap! most Unix shop that used to work with SCO are moving to Linux. Why? because the client doesn't want to pay the $1000 license price tag if he can spend $60 on RedHat which have 70% market share..
Hetz (Heunique)
I think what is occuring here is differnt in two important ways from the earlier fragmentation. First of all the current changes in the UNIX world, even if they do create "new OSes" are actually moves towards GREATER compatibility. If software from vendor X runs on vendor Y's machine there is no division and competition, rather than breaking up effort, drives people on to better software. This OpenUnix takes an already existing system (SCO) and allows it to run linux binaries (essentially encouraging development for the standard linux system).
OS X takes MacOS and makes it compatible with FreeBSD.
Finally the fact that so many of the products that make up these systems are open source compatibility is much easier.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Linux is number 27 in server uptimes. Don't believe me? see
l
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.htm
Its all *BSD and some Irix before linux even shows.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
No, its true! Linux doesn't work!
I also run a system with NTFS (Windows 2000), and after compiling the Linux kernel under Visual C++ (which was an effort in itself) and copying it over C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\NTOSKRNL.EXE, my machine won't even boot anymore.
Goddamned Linux... *grumble grumble*
Great. Another article that as a lot of technical possibility, and all I hear are license considerations and politics. Anybody want to enlighten the rest of us as to why exactly this release is significant? Is the OpenUNIX kernel somehow better than the Linux kernel? At what things? What's the VM system look like? Real meaty stuff that nobody seems to talk about...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
This is called a microkernel and is apparently popular with OS researchers. Linus Torvalds explicitly rejected this view, much to the disgust of OS expert Andrew Tannenbaum. Read more here.
Most good software, including Linux, is not object oriented. The idea that software must be either object oriented or chaotic spaghetti code is wrong. To put it simply, Linux had to be fast in order to win. OO code tends to be slower.
You seem to want a microkernel, object oriented operating system. This is the opposite of Linux.
But I would settle on a close-source kernel (after all, nobody should know their CPU better than themselves) toghether with all the open-source goodies which I love, officially compiled and supported by SUN.
Thanks to sites like freesolaris ( once openly linked by SUN, but now no more ), I already have somethink like this ( also because most SUN software has orrible price/quality ratio. Take Forte, for instance ...).
Ciao
----
FB
I had to set up a server running SCO Unix for a large web site. It was years ago, in the Linux 1.2 days. /etc directory. I had to reinstall everything from scratch. One day of uptime, wow.
SCO was a pain to install, there was even no driver for our classical adaptec adapter. We had to call the support and wait during one week to have a fucking floppy disk with the driver.
Then, compiling anything on the box (like the first release of the "Apache" server) was a pain. A lot of libraries like 'crypt' were missing. I had to tweak the source code a lot, port external libraries, etc. to have something that worked on SCO.
And the kernel crashed. I rebooted, and a lot of files were corrupted, including almost everything in the
It finally worked, I just had to import the existing web pages and images from a DAT tape. Guess what ? Only 2 Gb tapes were supported by SCO, and the support center was unable to help.
I ended up wiping the hard disk, and installed Linux. Everything worked perfectly, and what took me an entiere week of work with SCO was redone in 3 hours with Linux.
SCO has probably improved since, but I don't trust that operating system any more. It was dog slow, it was a hell to compile anything on it, the default shell was an horror, it didn't support common hardware...
If you don't like the Linux kernel, watch out for Debian/OpenBSD instead.
{{.sig}}
I didn't know that. But I guess the dividing line is the use of methods to get/set members of a structure. This trades off speed for encapsulation. Linux isn't doing that, is it?
Some other features that Unix System V concentrated heavily on were support for symmetric multiprocessing (not just 2-4 processors but much larger numbers) and schedulers designed to handle hard real-time constraints, e.g. aircraft control or chemical process control applications that get really grumpy if you don't handle them every millisecond, on the millisecond. The real-time *has* gotten much easier since the days of the 386 and its ~5 bogomips, but it still takes grunging through the entire kernel and finding anything that blocks critical resources and makes sure the blocking is limited to short enough time periods to meet the constraints.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks